Teaching through Ramadan: Supporting our Muslim Students
Ramadan Mubarak! رمضان كريم
We’re in the season of Ramadan, which this year lasts from April 12 to May 12. (Updated 2024 dates: Sun, Mar 10 – Tue, Apr 9). This is the time of the year when many Muslims fast (or abstain from food and drink) from sunrise to sunset. It’s a time of both daily sacrifice and celebration. The holiday culminates in Eid, a several-day festival of food, gifts, and togetherness.
What is the Purpose of Ramadan?
Ramadan is a Muslim holiday. Islam, directly translated, means “peace”. Ramadan, which occurs during the ninth month of the lunar calendar, is a reflection of this. It is a period of introspection, prayer, self-improvement, and community.
Muslims believe that activities like fasting and zakat (charity and generosity) encourage self-discipline, gratitude, and empathy. Practicing these are qualities during Ramadan (and throughout the year) is said to strengthen one’s spiritual connection to God, or Allah (SWT). It is believed that the Qur’an was first revealed to the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH) during the last ten days of Ramadan.
Who takes part in Ramadan?
Most Muslims celebrate the month of Ramadan, but not all participate in fasting. Those who are very young, elderly, pregnant, breastfeeding, menstruating, or have health conditions, might not fast. Some who do not fast during Ramadan may choose to recover missed days later in the year.
What does a day of Ramadan look like?
Suhoor begins a typical day during the month of Ramadan. This meal takes place before dawn, usually between 2-4 am, and is followed by morning prayers, or Fajr. If a person is fasting, they will probably return to sleep. Fasting has now begun, so the person will try to refrain from food or water until the Maghrib prayer at sunset.
Then, family and friends gather for Iftar. This is a celebratory meal that usually begins with the eating of dates to break the fast, followed by traditional dishes (and often in abundance!). Some families stay up late into the evenings celebrating, socializing, praying, or reading from the Qur’an.
Eid-al-Fitr marks the end of Ramadan. Morning prayer is followed by two or three days of communal celebration. During the time of Eid, families may decorate their homes with lanterns or lights, host elaborate meals, give and receive gifts, or attend street festivals dedicated to the occasion. It is an occasion of joy, gratitude, togetherness, eating, and giving.
How can I acknowledge and support my Ramadan-observing students?
Self-educate. Muslim students should not be expected to teach others about their faith, practices, or traditions. Do not assume that a Muslim student wishes to share about these experiences or explain a decision to (or not to) fast. By taking the time to learn more about the month of Ramadan and the folks who take part in it, we can identify points of connection and better anticipate students’ needs.
Avoid assumptions. Keep in mind that Islam, like any religion, is widely interpreted and experienced. Muslim families and individuals may enjoy varied traditions- including the degree to which they practice aspects of their deen, or faith. Talking to students or families privately about how to best support them can increase feelings of comfort and belonging.
Consider scheduling. Fasting from food and water can be tough on students. It can impact energy levels, concentration, and mood. Many students will wake in the hour before sunrise to eat and pray, so sleeping may be interrupted, too.
When planning for participation-heavy content, cooperative engagement, and deep-level thinking, try aiming for the morning, when energy and concentration are likely to be higher. Nagla Badir, writing for Teaching While Muslim, recommends having online assignments due late at night, so that students can complete them after they’ve had a chance to have dinner. This is also an opportunity to think carefully about the timing of calendar events like a band performance or prom, which can share time spaces with Iftar or Eid.
Badir also shares this calendar, where you can look up prayer times for students in your area!
Create safe spaces. For many observers, the period of Ramadan is a time of increased prayer, which occurs during specific windows of the day. Students who may have originated from countries or communities with high Muslim populations would have this time built into their school day. Of course, this is not often the case in U.S. schools, where many of the staff may not even be aware of this need. Having a space set aside (or two spaces, one for males and one for females) can help ensure that these students are seen and valued at school.
Muslim students who, for health or personal reasons, are not fasting during Ramadan may also benefit from a separate space during eating times. These individuals may face uncomfortable pressure or questioning as to why they are not fasting; having a safe location to go to can ease this stress.
Boost Socio-Emotional Learning. Ramadan is a time of family, friends, and community. Often, our observing students are physically distant from family members and/or feel that their holiday isn’t shared with others in the school or locality. This may be especially true for our Recent Arriver newcomers.
At school (whether in person or remote) we can be intentional about incorporating opportunities to learn and practice SEL skills- especially those that include elements of self-awareness, grounding, and collaboration. This important step can help diminish feelings of isolation and support students’ mental and emotional well-being during the period of Ramadan and beyond.
Engage through children’s books. Muslim and Muslim-American literature can be incredibly powerful in facilitating “door and window” experiences for Muslim students in the classroom. There’s an added benefit, too- books can engage non-Muslim students in ways that invite connection, empathy, and tolerance. We’ll visit some of these titles in an upcoming post. In the meantime, start here, at I’m Your Neighbor Books (I’d recommend sticking around to check out this super valuable sight!).
Where can I learn more?
Great question! Here are some of my favorite sites. Have more to add? Please do share them below!
Teaching While Muslim https://www.teachingwhilemuslim.org/
Hijabi Librarians https://hijabilibrarians.com/
ING- Ramadan Information Sheet https://ing.org/ramadan-information-sheet/
Learning For Justice: https://www.learningforjustice.org/magazine/teaching-about-ramadan-and-eid
Muslim Students Association National https://www.msanational.org/resources
With increased awareness- and with some tools in our toolboxes, we can be better prepared to support our Muslim students throughout this beautiful month and beyond, Inshallah!
Ramadan Mubarak, friends. Wishing you all you, peace, and abundance! لويز اليعفوري
Crossing Cultural Thresholds- Engaging EL Caretakers in the Trauma-Aware Conversation
Let’s look to tools and strategies that facilitate re-directive capacities and champion long-term moves toward resiliency. We’ll spend a bit of extra time focused on our Recent Arriver Emergent Lingual (RAEL) students. In this space, we’ll highlight EL parents and families as critical stakeholders in students’ trauma restoration processes.
Trauma-informed pedagogy relies upon, in part, the explicit teaching and modeling of regulatory and prosocial behaviors. Eventually, these strategies can be holistically embedded into children’s everyday school (and life) experiences. In the context of RAEL populations, this also means bridging cultural norms and expectations around mental wellbeing. As learning places, this requires a concentrated shift toward integrating diverse cultural value systems into our trauma-sensitive practice.
The National Council for Behavioral Health names two dimensions of sustainability in trauma-informed programming:
1. Making changes, gains, and accomplishments stick
2. Keeping the momentum moving forward for continuous quality improvement.
So, how can we best support these two dimensions? A sustainable path toward resilience requires us, as practitioners, to monitor students’ success and adapt our instructional cues as needed. Fortunately, we already recognize this as a best practices approach across all grade levels, content areas and language domains. We are experts at checking in on our students and personalizing the learning experience based upon individual strengths and needs. The same tenets apply to the processes of transition shock, including trauma.
Shifts are required in the broader educational landscape, too. Sustainability requires honest conversations about our organization’s infrastructure, including leadership, policies, and procedures as they ignite or diffuse underlying transition shock. It demands moving away from punitive practices and toward restorative solution seeking. Sustainability relies upon the collection and analysis of data in order to determine if our trauma-informed programming is effective and equitable. It means that all team members are equipped with tools for understanding and addressing student trauma, and that educators are widely supported in recognizing and managing the secondary stress that may arise through our work with trauma-impacted youth.
Essentially, we are charged with ensuring that the strategies we introduce are good fits for individual students. A good fit means that they are not re-triggering and are both culturally responsive and language adaptive. A good fit means that learners are empowered to experiment with mitigation strategies in their toolboxes, to fail forward in a safe space, to reevaluate without self-admonishment, and to try again.
Involving Caretakers as Critical Stakeholders
If we are to truly address transition shock (including trauma) in our learning spaces, then we must also become active in engineering webs of support around our students- in this case, we’re speaking specifically about our RAELs. Here, we’ll concentrate on arguably the most critical stakeholder group of all- the parents and caretakers of our Emergent Linguals.
In communicating with culturally and linguistically dynamic caretaker groups about transition shock, it’s important to first identify our guiding principles. How do we cross cultural thresholds to build authentic partnerships?
As with our students, safety and trust are paramount. Cultivate these properties as we would in the classroom- practice welcoming, routine, predictability, and transparency.
Be cognizant of biases around mental health and trauma. Name observed behaviors and avoid labeling.
Reduce isolation by connecting families to appropriate resources, as well as to families with socio-cultural commonalities.
Strive to meet with parents in person and, if needed, arrange for a trained translator wherever possible. Avoid using children as conversational brokers.
Talk to parents about the link between students’ school performance and socio-mental health. Use direct and clear language.
Remember that mental health terms may be unfamiliar, unmeaningful, or untranslatable for Recent Arriver parents. Translate these terms ahead of time if possible, and provide visual cues where appropriate.
Honor socio-cultural perspectives when advocating for student care.
Champion wrap-around supports and refer students for advanced care in a timely manner.
Sustainability is enhanced when students’ home and cultural values show up in the school space. Highlighting the voices of our RAELs’ caretakers can simultaneously bolster our culturally responsive efforts and temper student anxiety. Meanwhile, opening doors to culturally responsive communication around trauma-sensitive topics builds trust and enables a collaborative approach to long-term restoration.
Mitigating Student Trauma in the Virtual Classroom
The most common question on deck these days: How do I go about minimizing student trauma in the virtual setting?
Of course, this is a loaded question. So let’s start by laying a foundation. Here are the most practical ways to get started (or to boost your existing trauma-informed practice).
Reframe the conversation: Mitigating trauma isn't about fixing broken things. It's about restoring power. The distinction is critical. This power belongs to our students, and they’ve owned it all along. Sometimes it gets interrupted. We can see ourselves as technicians, trained to employ tools that can help to get the power-up and running again. The next step: turn those Power Restoration tools over to our students.
Get Brainy: Don't underestimate the power that comes from understanding the human brain. Set aside the time. Open the conversation. Invite students to become observers of their own thinking (metacognition). Practice non-judgmental recognition of fight-flight-freeze-submit responses. Experiment with trauma minimizing strategies in a safe space to discover 'just right' fits.
Resources:
Elementary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_dxnYhdyuY
Upper Grades Parts of the Brain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CpRY9-M
Upper Grades Fight-Flight-Freeze: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpolpKTWrp4
Elementary Journal: What Survival Looks Like for Me (Inner World Work): http://www.innerworldwork.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/What-survival-looks-like...-for-me-3.pdf
Upper Grades Journal: What Survival Looks Like In Secondary School (Inner World Work): http://www.innerworldwork.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Survival-In-Secondary-School.pdf
Practice Predictability: YOU show up day after day. Remember that this seemingly simple act goes a long way in minimizing the impacts of trauma for our students. The consistency of your presence and the routine you strive for in daily learning is critical. Preemptively signal upcoming changes, where possible. Predictability fosters trust. Trust lends itself to safety. And when students feel safe, they are able to learn.
Host a Restore Your Power Space: Create a space or folder in whatever virtual platform you're using. House Power Restoration tools here and encourage students to visit, even when school's not in session. Digital black-out or magnetic poetry, drawing/sketchnoting tools, guided bilateral movements, and SEL-based calming strategies are all good fits here. Looking for more resources and strategies? Explore our blog and stay tuned for our upcoming book on this topic with ASCD (due early 2021).
Resources:
Mitigating Transition Shock in Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Settings. Louise El Yaafouri (DiversifiED Consulting) and Saddleback Education: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9KxIFECSF8
Edutopia: Strategies for Easing Transition Shock by Louise El Yaafouri (DiversifiED Consulting) https://www.edutopia.org/article/strategies-easing-transition-shock
Art Therapy ideas: https://diversifi-ed.com/explore/2018/10/1/art-therapy-for-trauma-in-the-classroom
Recommended at-home resource: http://www.innerworldwork.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/What-Survival-Looks-Like-At-Home-Quick-Printout.pdf
5 Tenets of Teacher Self-Care (and the mistakes that helped me discover them)
Image Credit: Shutterstock
Here it is: we are not superhuman.
Educators, as an occupational whole, tend to submerge this truth. We ignore it, push it away, and look the other direction even as it sinks down into the recesses of our thinking.
And so, we educators require frequent reminders of our vulnerability- and more than that, encouragement that our humanness is a spectacular mark of endurance, bravery, and triumph. After all, we’re living the process: trekking the course, failing forward, making small (and giant) moves toward success. Heck, we’re shaping spectacular generations of tiny humans and young adults.
Isn’t that enough?
One might think. We might think. So, how are we such experts at forgetting our own freaking fabulousness?
Ladies and gents, it’s time to turn a page, to support one another, and to make it a movement. We owe ourselves some delicious self-appreciation. We need to be reminded that perfectionism is not our ally in teaching. In fact, sometimes a bit of disaster or delay or detour is its own kind of perfect. Sometimes, these are healthy indicators that authentic learning is taking place.
We didn’t sign up for a competition of Pintrest-y brilliance or TPT worthiness. We signed up to grow young people into decent, well-rounded adult human beings. How can we possibly expect that process to be neat and tidy? Anyone have completely a drama-free kiddo out there? ‘Cause I’ve never known one. In any event, why would we want a totally systematic, predictable standard for education? Sounds pretty dull (and not particularly effective).
On this rant about perfection: what is it exactly that we’re aiming for? Who are the chosen few who get to decide what that is or what that looks like? Show me a perfect textbook, a perfect curriculum, a perfect approach- and I’ll show you fifteen people ready to argue against it. So again, where are we going with this whole ‘be the best’ race?
The best is us, teachers. Right now, as we are and as we are growing to be. And damn it, we’re not the kind of perfect that rubrics were made for.
So we’ve got to give ourselves some grace. We’ve got to let the sweat run down our cheeks without being embarrassed about it. This business that we’re in requires effort. A ridiculous amount of it. Sometimes it overwhelms us. And that’s ok. (I know I’m not the only one to fight back- or fail to fight back- some super sneaky tears in the classroom.)
When we follow the good advice of putting our own oxygen masks on first, our students are the beneficiaries.
Let’s start simply, by embedding these simple practices into our daily craft:
1. Do unto yourself as you do unto others.
How are we inclined to talk to our students- with sarcasm and criticism or with kindness and encouragement? How do we view our students- from a deficit lens or an asset lens? How do we define our students’ success- by a narrowly prescribed definition or according to gains along a personalized growth trajectory?
Yeah, we know the response. We’re educators, right? So, let’s turn it around on ourselves. Imagine: What if we talked to, reacted to, and supported ourselves in the same manner that we do our students?
This is harder than it sounds. We’ve trained ourselves into becoming hypercritical of our teacher-self-worth.
Stop.
What did you survive today? What went incredibly right? How has your craft improved over the last year, month, or week? Whose morning did you turn around with a hug, smile, or kind word? Who did you potentially spare from a not-so-great decision?
Take a few moments to celebrate you. Check yourself in your self-talk. Would you say this to your student? Reframe, rephrase, and fill up your cup. You’ve earned every last bit of it.
2. Embrace collectivism.
Like it or not, folks, we’re in this together. My favorite Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. quote: “We may have all come on different ships, but we’re all in the same boat now.”
Sisters and brothers of our craft, we’re going to be spending a lot of time together. So, seek out people that you want to be on this ride with. Who makes you excited about your role and the work that you’re doing? Who’s your venting ear? Who’s the cheerleader? The joker? The advice-giver? The walking ELD standards encyclopedia? The mentee under your wing?
Find and foster these relationships. You don’t have to be besties outside of school. Shoot, you don’t even have to have each other’s phone numbers (although that’s fun, too).
Then, put yourselves on the same team. You’re all going for one goal- student success. Everybody on the team has a role, which is to meet students where they are from his or her unique vantage point and with his or her unique set of tools. Each person is necessary to the others in the aim of achieving the goal.
In this context, competition is irrelevant. Not only this, but it can also compromise the team’s ability to reach the goal. Leaning exclusively on neatly-packaged curricula also loses its meaning. We are the tools we need to reach and teach our learners. The textbooks and Google slides and lesson plans and Zoom sessions aren’t the master plan- they are supplementary materials.
Learn about your teammates’ strengths. Instead of aiming to outdo their efforts (guilty as charged), learn to leverage these assets in building consistency and getting through to kids. Ask for a shared sub day and spend an hour in one another’s classrooms if you’re able. Allow a few minutes within team planning time to just be present in cultivating relationships. You might look outside of the building, too. Twitter is a great place to expand your professional learning network and maybe even discover a few new members of your clan.
Also, don’t be an ass. Your tribe doesn’t need it, and neither do you.
3. Set down the assessments (just for a minute).
Here are a few bright spots in my teaching career: I consistently had the lowest standardized testing scores of all same-grade classrooms at our school over a nine-year period, and I was barely rated an “Approaching” level teacher six years into my practice.
Ok. Let’s talk about this. Those low scores- 100% of my students each year were refugee and immigrant newcomers. Heck no, they weren’t able to keep up on those tests (*at first…but watch them soar now). “Welcome to America, kids... here’s your test.” Then, the digital assessments came around. Jiminy, half of my kids had never used a desktop in their lives. The first thirty minutes of an online test is an exercise in how not to sword fight with a computer mouse.
You know what those tests didn’t show (or at least, didn’t make room to celebrate)? Growth. Like, crazy out of control multi-year gains in nine months kind of growth.
How about those teacher evaluations? Three weeks before that mediocre evaluation I was rated “Effective” by a different district evaluator. And two weeks after the “Approaching” mark (which I cried and whined to my tribe over), another administrator found me to be “Distinguished” (the highest-rated evaluation score in our district).
So, which one am I? Best guess... probably somewhere in the middle, leaning toward pretty freaking good. I mean, I sure didn’t jump the scales of expertise in 2 weeks- and I probably wasn’t as ineffective as I’d led myself to believe after that ‘off’ evaluation, either.
Here’s the deal: assessments and evaluations are what we make of them. Do we learn something? Do we make a plan to improve and grow? Great.
Should we give away our power to them and let them stress us out? Nope.
We encourage our students to see their self worth as something that is independent of an isolated data point (or any other statistic, for that matter). Dear educators: if we’re going to pull that equity card, then we’d better start making room for ourselves in that grand philosophy, too. Um, are you listening in on this, too, admin? That also goes for what we put on our Ts.
4. Maintain high expectations, but lower the risk.
Here’s another one we practice with our students, right? We know that in order to enable our learners as positive risk-takers, we need to:
Create an environment of safety and trust;
Offer choice and support; and
Not make it a super freaking scary thing to do.
So where’s the self-love?
Again, let’s go back to how we treat others. How do we make leap-taking a little less intimidating for our students?. We provide high yield opportunities in low-drama settings. We encourage multiple means of demonstrating proficiency. (What works in one class setting may not be what my newcomer students- or what your kiddos- need right now.) We model cooperative learning and constructive conversation... including those talks with the ol’ self.
We, teachers- we’re great at a lot of things. Self-care isn’t usually on that list. It’s like it’s part of the standard educator’s playbook: students first = self last.
No and no. Take that page out. Burn it. Start a new story.
Yes- hold yourself accountable. Do aim for greatness. But damn it, give yourself some freaking wiggle room. Wrap your own anticipated growth up in the same fabric of fun and curiosity that you would for your students. Anxiety should not be a badge of teaching honor.
5. Recognize discomfort, but don’t let it define the situation.
Quick story: Long ago, in my first year of teaching refugee newcomers, I had the brilliant first-day-of-school idea to sit eight students from Myanmar (Burma) together at the same table so that they could “help each other out”. How’d that work out for us, you ask?
Well, it didn’t. The eight students spoke five different languages and came from six distinct cultures. They were also at literal war with each other in the real world.
Talk about a hitch in the classroom-management flow. But here’s the thing: we got through it. We eventually adjusted, learned some new ways of coping, adopted a few healthy communication tools, and had a really awesome year. Some of those nine-year-olds even became viable bridges between the tribes that existed in their own apartment communities.
That discomfort was like a fertilizer for our growth. And, of course, the best fertilizer is a pile of... super smelly business.
Let’s not sugar coat the situation. Our work is hard. Like, really freaking hard. Some moments are rougher than others. Some days we come up short. And sometimes, there’s not a dang thing we can do about it.
But did we go back into the ring?
If the answer is yes, stop there. That’s the game-changer.
Thanks, educators, for doing what you do: for showing up for our kids, for creating safe spaces, for co-constructing our collective futures. Now, go take care of yourself for a minute, will you?
You deserve it.